


Youth

by Laqueus



Category: Red vs. Blue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-14 16:54:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4572300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laqueus/pseuds/Laqueus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Although it might be strange to imagine, there was a time when General Donald Doyle, leader of the Federal Army Of Chorus, was a child."<br/>A small look into Doyle's life, and the time after his death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Youth

.  
Although it might be strange to imagine, there was a time when General Donald Doyle, leader of the Federal Army Of Chorus, was a child.

Back then, the young Donald (a term he hasn't been for many, many years), was once perusing through an old junk shop. The little shop was cramped and dimly lit, with a mixture of rickety old shelves, even ricketier old tables, and every available inch of space covered in assorted junk that spilt over into piles on the floor. Down through the crowded aisles wandered Donald, stopping here and there to gleefully pick and up and examine things which looked interesting. There was the usual assortment of alien artifacts that the people of Chorus had long come to regard as tat, which filled junk shops all across the planet - strange objects, weapons which didn't fire, weird little cubes that everyone used as paperweights. A lot of the other items in the shop were salvage from ships that were shot down. These items tended to be more pricey, rarer since they came from 'off-planet'.

As he reached up to look at (yet another) useless piece of alien tech, a book caught the boy's eye. It was rather battered, sticking out from a pile of books that was evidentally part of a series all titled "A Guide To Alien Wallpapers 2300-2353", incorrectly lumped with them. Curious, Donald carefully pulled it out. _Keebler-Whittaker's Guide To Organs_ , the title proudly proclaimed. He flipped it open. Flipped thorugh a few pages. Started to read, a grin spreading over his small face. He couldn't believe it, inside this book were the strangest items he'd ever seen, strange boxes, sometimes curved, sometimes lit up, with multiple keyboards and pedals, surrounded by little buttons and switches, and some of the grander ones even having pipes rising out of the back of them like great smokestacks into the sky. It was like something out of a fairy tale, and the young Donald almost expected the contraptions to rear up and start moving about of their own accord. Something clicked in him, and he simply had to know more about these wonderful machines.

Donald left the shop clutching the book under one arm, and from that day on, the book was practically glued to the boy. Whether it was sitting by his bed, having been read late into the night, or safely tucked under his arm whilst out and about, to being something to read when the entire family was cowering in their shelter, hoping the bombs didn't score a direct hit, wherever Donald was, _Keebler-Whittaker's Guide To Organs_ was never far behind. He rapidly lost count of how many times through it, the pages slowly becoming even more dog eared, the spine increasingly creased and floppy, the cover even more faded and worn.

And slowly, over the years, more books on organs joined the first, from others that looked at famous organs from around the galaxy, and the alien equivilents, to a few actual ones with sheet music in them. If you were being fanciful, one could say it was like a grand treasure hunt. If you were being realistic, you could say that it was a boy trying to find a bright spot, just a way of keeping his head up during what seemed like an unending war.

Ah, but wonder of wonders! Many years down the line, from when he first picked up that old book, Donald actually managed to get his hands on an organ! Granted, it required quite a bit of wrangling to accquire, and it was very small, more like a vertical box than an organ, with some of the stops missing, and a makeshift pedalboard, but by gum, but Donald loved and treasured it as if it were the Mighty S'kethe Neubulosa Organ of Gemula. It was anyone's guess as to how, but he even managed to wrangle tunes out of the thing, teaching himself using his old books and sheet music.

A year later, Donald stands in a queue in a dusty old room. Every few minutes, the queue shuffles forward a little, another form filled in, another body added to the conflict. As he shuffles forward, Donald muses to himself that if not for the war he would have been a organist. He feels it in his very bones; is certain of it as the sun rising and war casualties. The line shuffles forward again, and he knows that whilst his dream is just that, a(n organ) pipe dream, the war is very real. He finds his hand automatically drifitng to his ear. Part of the lobe has long been missing due to a bullet.In the end, everything boils down to The War. 

\---

II.

The war.  
The war had been there for as long as Doyle had lived, and it had been going all throughout his parents and grandparents and even a little way into his great-grandparents lifetimes too. In many ways, Chorus and War had become intertwined, almost as if one could no longer exist without the other. It always brought an old image to Doyle's mind, an ancient symbol from far-off Earth: Caduceus' staff, the two snakes entwined around a staff, endlessly tangled together forever. War was the sort of thing that would be advertised on Chorus travel brochures, if anyone gave a damn about some forgotten backwater planet long enough to make a brochure of it:

_Do you want a holiday filled with excitement? Where you'll learn new skills and put them to good use or die trying? Do you enjoy taking a side in conflict? Do you want to get away from it all, and never want the holiday to end? Well then, come on down to Chorus, the planet of eternal civil war! Your holiday here is guaranteed to never end, because you'll be trapped heer along with the rest of us until someone gets a lucky shot on you, all of us are dead, or the enitre planet is destroyed. Chorus! Book today!_

\---

III.

Many years later, Kimball finds herself wandering the streets of Armonia late one night . She's not entirely sure what time it is, maybe midnight or even later, but whatever time it may or may not be, the important thing is she cannot sleep.

Plenty of inane reasons runs through her head as to why she should be asleep - _it's been a long day, it's the designated sleeping time, everyone else is asleep, you'll regret this in the morning_. But there's just one thing preventing Kimball from getting that delightful elusive sleep: _Armonia itself_. Oh, sure, it's one thing to call a truce of sorts, and all share the same base, but...

But spending years knowing this as the base of _the enemy_ doesn't really go away in a single day. Adrenaline is running through her veins when it really shouldn't be, leaving her fired up. So Kimball wanders the streets, trying to clear her head and damp down her jangled nerves enough to sleep. Walking through the darkened city, it's a far cry from the New Republic's jungle base, where the buzz of insects was all around and far-off creatures would scream throughout the night. Here, there is just the echo of her boots against the concrete. The city is so cramped, buildings all rising into the sky, jostling one another for space. Internally, Kimball notes that she's just traded one sort of jungle for another. The jungle noises might (read: always did) bother the new recruits at first, and Kimball had long gotten used to them, but _this_? This cold, echoing silence? This was somehow worse than the noises from the jungle. As a result, any new noise sticks out like an unarmoured piece of skin. Kimball roams up and down street and avenue, and all of a sudden she feels sick in the pit of her stomach. Sick of the city, sick of the war, sick of the circumstances that have lead them all here. She just wants to get back to her quarters, a bolt hole where she can forget all of this for a few hours.

With a sigh, she begins the trek back.

Did all these builidngs always look the same?

Did she take a right or a left here? This place was like a maze in the dark.

Eventually Kimball reaches her tempoary quarters, pushes the door open, ready to drop into bed-  
only to be greeted with lights, music, and a man sitting in her room.

What the fuck?

Taking in the scenery, the little knickknacks here and there, the stack of books in the corner, and the size and the layout befitting a certain rank, so similar to her own, Kimball has only one conclusion. She's just wandered unannounced into Doyle's room.

Thankfully, Doyle hasn't noticed her enter, being too engrossed in the old box that he's sitting in front of. Except, Kimball realises, it's not a box but a very battered old organ. And he's doing more than sitting, he's actually playing the thing, bobbing around slightly as his fingers dance over the keys. And loathe as she is to admit it, Doyle is actually... decent at playing the thing.

Carefully, Kimball begins to back away to the door. It's late, she's tired, this whole situation is weird, and quite frankly she'd like the evening to pass without butting heads with her ex-enemy.

She's almost there, almost out of the door, halfway through when Doyle turns sharply, his playing cut off, suddenly aware of someone watching him.

_Shit,_ thinks Kimball.

His gaze comes to rest on Kimball, half in his room. For a moment the pair eye each other up, it is, after all, the first time the former enemies have seen one another outside of armour. It's strange in a way, to have a human face to associate with the name, and not just a helmet. When you live in armour, you find yourself relying more on body language and tone of voice rather than facial expressions. So seeing someone's face has gained a bizarre degree of intimacy. Kimball finds Doyle to be older than she realised, sitting firmly in his mid forties.

He's remarkable unscarred, save for a chunk missing from an ear.  
Chorus' entire history of conflict stretches out between them, in the form of a thick, uncomfortable silence.

"Ah-hah, ah, erm, Miss... Kimball?" Doyle eventually stammers.

" _General_ Kimball," Kimball flatly corrects.

"Ah, yes, erm, of course." His gaze drops a moment, then shifts back up. "Is there perhaps something I can _help_ you with? Just seeing as you seem to be intent on paying my quarters a visit in the middle of the night, it can't help but wonder if anything is amiss, eh?"

For a moment, (surprising even herself) a very tiny part of Kimball wants to compliment him on his playing, but she instead crushes it with "... No." Another awkward silence threatens to rear up, before she adds "I was taking a walk."

"Ah, I see. I can't help but notice that is is rather late to be talking a walk."

"It's rather late to be playing the organ. Besides," Kimball adds, "I thought I'd familiarise myself with the city, and the location of your quarters. If we're stu- going to be staying here, then it's important to know the layout." It's a flimsy excuse that answers no questions, and they both know it.

Instead of pointing out the obvious, like _it would be easier to navigate in the day_ , Doyle merely responds with "Hmm, well, quite."

Another silence stretches between them.

Eventually Kimball breaks it with "I need to be on my way. We've got a lot of work to do in the morning."

"Ah, yes, of course! We're all going to be quite busy indeed, what with our new alligeance and whatnot, eh?" says Doyle, making a show of getting up and stretching.

Kimball merely nods and makes a noncommital noise, before withdrawing from the doorway. Once sure that she’s out of both sight and earshot, she rapidly marches away, somehow managing to locate her quarters in record time, happy to collapse into the bed.

As Kimball disappears out of the doorway, for a moment Doyle is reminded of that old image, the two snakes entwined around the staff, he and Kimball, the Federal Army and the New Republic, entwined around Chorus.

\---

IIII.

Kimball is no stranger to seeing the dead in her dreams. There's a war on. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who didn't see the face of someone in their dreams, be it a loved one, or someone they failed to protect, or just someone who died in front of them. In a way, Chorus was a planet full of ghosts that only haunted people at night. Kimball has long learned to live with it, just another normal sort of dream, like being naked in school, or falling off something, or taking a test, or being late, or all four at the same time. Chorus had its own dream specific to it and that dream was to see the dead.

_The night after he dies, Kimball dreams. In it she is in Armonia again, on that first night there. She wanders through the streets, but the builidngs are slightly hazy, warping slightly as if to point out that she never properly knew how they looked and that she is dreaming. In alleyways and from out of windows and doorways peek the faces Kimball has known and lost, former Generals, old squadmates, family and friends. They do not approach, just watch. Somewhere there is music, and Kimball begins to follow it. (While she travels through Armonia, her mind matter-of-factly points out that Armonia was destroyed, in the blunt way that dreams do). Eventually, she reaches the source, looks through the doorway and is greeted not with a hazy warped version of Doyle's room, but a bright white space where it should be. Sure enough however, there is Doyle, hammering out a new tune on that old beat-up organ of his. His fingers play across the keys, his feet stomping on the pedals, making little adujustments here and there every so often. Bizarrely, he is full armour, but it doens't affect his playing. Kimball's mind reasonably ""explains"" this being due to the armour, the Fed armour is white with accents, so that makes it thinner and more easy to play instruments in. For a while, she stands and listens whilst Doyle continues playing. When he eventually finishes, he sits there for a moment._

_Then speaks._

_"General Kimball. The armies are in your, I must say, more than capable hands now."_

_Doyle then turns to look at her over his shoulder. The front of his helmet is cracked. Slowly nods. Then both Doyle and the organ fade away into nothingness._

_Kimball awakes to a darkened room, and a strange sense of loss in her chest._

_She never sees him in her dreams again._

\---

IIII.

_She would be the last person to ever admit it, but the fact of the matter is this: Kimball missed Doyle, and never really knew or understood why. It was so strange, for so long she had known Doyle as The Enemy, then Enemy Turned Ally In The Loosest Sense Of the Word, and if you were to ask her if she would miss him if he died, her answer would be a definitive 'No'. Then he had to go and die and prove her wrong. For the first week or so, she found herself acting as he was still there, preparing to face some sort of opposition from him about an order, only to then remember that he was gone. When she went to give orders, it was almost a shock to have little opposition, like going to shove open a stiff door, only to end up shooting through, the door having been unknowingly oiled. Kimball missed the space where he was. The way he'd blather on, his speech peppered with little things like 'ah' and 'er' and 'well'. Heck, in a way she even missed butting heads with him. Don't get her wrong, he could be a supremely irritating coward, too concerned with trying to preserve lives than take a risk, but in a way he was her supremely irritating coward.  
Doyle not being there It was like he left a hole where he'd been, as if life was a photo and someone had just taken the liberty of cutting him out of all the pictures. In the end, Kimball did what she always did: boxed him away with all the others she'd known and loved who'd died, and continued on as always. After all, she had a war to win._

IIIII.

_All things must come to an end some day, and the war is no exception. Once everything is official with all the correct stamps in the correct boxes (and who would have ever thought that war would have so many forms?), the clean up begins. It takes them a while to get to Armonia, having to wait until it is deemed safe enough to enter, but eventually they are granted access to the ruins of the Capital. Salvage, exploration, and assesment is their main mission, but they go in with low expectations. What could have possibly surved that would be of use?_

_Their expectations end up being justified - there's not much to find among the rubble, just broken parts and broken bodies and decay. Occasionally they'll come across an item that can be salvaged or repaired in some sort of way and take it with them, but it's a rare instance._

_When they reach the reactor they only find a single item. Goodness knows how it survived, being so near the reactor when it went off, but here it is, lying on its side, front facing away from them and thankfully empty. Even before she sees it, Kimball knows that there is a crack across the front. When they leave the ruins, Kimball takes Doyle's cracked helmet with her._

\---

__

_We are the reckless,_

_We are the wild youth,_

_Chasing visions of our futures,_

_One day we'll reveal the truth,_

_That one will die before he gets there._

_\- Youth, Daughter_

**Author's Note:**

> A/N Normally I put all of this stuff at the top, but here it is at the bottom! Episode 16 really kicked my arse and motIvated me enought to get writing again, I haven’t properly written anything in a while, so it was nice to get back to it, and I hope you’ll forgive any mistakes that might have slipped through despite my best efforts.
> 
> At first it was just gonna be a headcanony thing about Doyle but then before I knew it, Kimball had slipped in and suddenly bam there she was and then it was backflipping into vaguely Kimboyle territory and orz
> 
> I almost cut the fourth part, might do so in the future, we'll see. Ah! And a moment of clarification, since I realise it might not be all that clear: Non-italacised text is pre-death, _italacised_ is after he's dead and gone. If that makes sense.
> 
> Doyle's cracked helmet based off this art piece: http://rain-spout.tumblr.com/post/125828561064/lightinghelmet-practice-yeah-lets-call-it  
> Song Inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEpMj-tqixs


End file.
